The Future

“We are very quickly entering a world where the difference between fantasy and reality is difficult or impossible to distinguish. It is a globalized world pulsing with information flows and data commodities, a place where infinite sub-cultures and mind cults live in their own pocket universes.”

- The Matrix

This Image, Error 001 is a collaborative piece with the animator Tahnee Gehm. The final product will be a still image with environmental effects in motion. Error 001 is the first in a narrative series of photo-illustrations exploring the narratives of the cyberpunk sub-genre.

Diverging from my previous photo-illustration styles of simulating photo realism, this series will be more illustration than photo. The photographic elements are shifted away from the realistic to blend with the illustrations. Image consistency is the key to a good illusion, the eye and brain of the audience will do the rest.

Cyberpunk is the ideal sub-genre for this series because its trope, struggling with the rapid growth of technology, is symbolic of the struggle of the photographer is an industry heading more towards moving imagery.

Architectonic

“The first gesture of an architect is to draw a perimeter; in other words, to separate the microclimate from the macro space outside. This in itself is a sacred act. Architecture in itself conveys this idea of limiting space. It’s a limit between the finite and the infinite. From this point of view, all architecture is sacred.”

- Mario Botta

“All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.”

- Gilbert K. Chesterton

This series was a long term exploration of Los Angeles. I was studying how the form and function of the city were illuminated by its different artificial lights. Tungsten, fluorescent and other lights blending together over a five, ten or fifteen minute exposures; combine that with unorthodox use of a camera’s color balance and the results are other worldly.

Credit to all of the friends who keep me company while I waited for a long exposure to finish.

Fantasy

“Fantasy, if it's really convincing, can't become dated, for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time.”

- Walt Disney

8x10 Industrial

“The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.”

- Leonardo Da Vinci

Salton Sea

“The violence that exists in the human heart is also manifest in the symptoms of illness that we see in the Earth, the water, the air and in living things.”

- Pope Francis

Post-Apocalypse

“Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.”

- Cormac McCarthy

“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”

- George Orwell

Paw

“Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That's the problem.”

- A.A. Milne

“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.”

- Mark Twain

Portraiture

“A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he is being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks.”

- Richard Avedon

Adversary

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

- Bruce Lee

Yellowstone

“There is a delight in the hardy life of the open. There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy and its charm. The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased and not impaired in value. Conservation means development as much as it does protection.”

- Theodore Roosevelt

Zion

"If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it."

- Lyndon B. Johnson

Ketchikan

“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”

– Anthony Bourdain

Night POV

“There was a sky somewhere above the tops of the buildings, with stars and a moon and all the things there are in a sky, but they were content to think of the distant street lights as planets and stars. If the lights prevented you from seeing the heavens, then preform a little magic and change reality to fit the need. The street lights were now planets and stars and the moon. ”

- Hubert Selby Jr.

Behind Imagination

“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.”

- Carl Sagan

Nonsense

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.”